Best Practice Recommendations for Conducting Controlled Trials in Clinical Hypnosis Research

There is an abundance of outcomes research for clinical hypnosis showing promising results, however, hypnosis is still underutilized in clinical care. For a behavioral intervention to enter mainstream clinical care, efficacy needs to be demonstrated with exceptionally high quality of evidence. Furthermore, the reporting of these studies also needs to be complete and sufficiently clear to show quality of evidence, and to enable replication and clinical use. The Task Force for Establishing Efficacy Standards for Clinical Hypnosis conducted a review of best practice guidelines in outcomes research, including a review of the CONSORT statement, TIDieR checklist, and the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. The present article provides best practice guidelines specific to conducting clinical hypnosis research. The guidelines comprise recommendations for planning, conducting, and reporting research in this field. The recommendations are presented in two tiers. Tier I recommendations include essential best practices, such as a call for the use of detailed research and intervention manuals, plans for and reporting of participant-education about hypnosis, the use of hypnotizability scales with good psychometric properties, and clear reporting of the hypnotizability measurement. They also instruct for sharing of intervention scripts and manuals, and the clear reporting of the induction procedure, the labeling of the intervention for participants, and the definition of hypnosis used. Tier II includes preferred recommendations, calling for measurement of adherence to home practice, measurement of hypnotizability by someone other than the interventionist, the use of hypnotizability scales with both subjective and behavioral measures of responsiveness, and the involvement pf participants from the full hypnotizability spectrum. They also recommend the assessment of response expectancy, therapeutic relationship, and other variables related to proposed mechanisms of action, and the reporting of participants prior hypnosis experiences, and the relationship of expectancies and treatment outcomes.This list of recommendations will be useful for researchers, reviewers, and journal editors alike when conducting, reporting, or evaluating studies involving clinical applications of hypnosis.